“In many ways this is a dream that’s been turned into a terrible, unresponsive nightmare.”
The features that Samsung is pushing the hardest—the don’t-call-it-a-stylus stylus and split-screen apps—are two areas where it falls the hardest.
For example: when you pull out the stylus, a drawer opens on screen with a handful of stylus-friendly apps. Clever, right? Except, you can’t change the apps in that drawer, and one of them is “S Calendar,” Samsung’s bizarre replacement for the default Android calendar app. Why do you need a stylus for your touch OS calendar?
Worse, the split-screen app mode looks like nothing short of a disaster. Besides the fact that you can only run a small handful of Samsung’s own custom (and crummy) apps side-by-side, they become horribly responsive. Toss in the “watch a video in a square above the other thing you’re doing” feature, and the app performance gets even worse.
If you’re going to differentiate yourself from the competition, make sure your bullet points are worthy of being bullet points.
